The present invention relates to Autistic individuals or special needs persons who have difficulty communicating with children and adults and, more particularly, to a system, devices and methods that are suited for monitoring and improving the training and social and eye contact and communication skills of such individuals.
Children and adults often require special services such as Speech Therapy, ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) Treatment, Occupational Therapy, and Physical Therapy. These services are labor intensive, data collection is demanding and documentation is overwhelming. Educational materials are either prepared from cut-outs of a magazine/workbook or available through costly educational suppliers that do not integrate the educational material with a student's/patient's educational program. Local schools and communities spend valuable resources on repetitive and low level educational goals. Trained professionals burn out quickly. More time is spent on administrative chores than on training and advancing the skills of the professionals in their field.
Currently there is no central database of information available on the data collected during the behavioral treatment process, and inadequate tools, for example, standardized tools to use to easily gather and enter information about patients. Information about treatment and care is paper based and gathered ad hoc and at best, effective treatments are siloed or isolated within a school or clinic.
Learning Theories
The principles of ‘Behavior’ have been identified by men like B. F. Skinner, F. Keller and W. N. Schoenfeld. More recently J. Michaels, J. W. Partington and M. L. Sundberg and D. Greer have elaborated and extended the categories of verbal and social behavior by identifying specific behavioral repertoires, functions and typologies that comply with the science and analysis of verbal, developmental and social behavior.
The prior art identifies various functional categories of verbal behavior, academic and social skills, and developmental stages. Assessments of verbal and social behaviors are done on a one-on-one encounter with the therapist or within a group setting. The therapist evaluates and identifies correct, incorrect, appropriate and inappropriate verbal, social and developmental behaviors within this setting. Sometimes timers and clickers are used to count and time the behaviors and responses that occur. The events are recorded in a manual fashion, i.e., a clip board and a pencil and based upon an isolated event.
The prior art identifies various systems for recording behavioral events that have occurred. The behavioral events are correlated with behavioral categories and are compared to the relative performance and fluency of other students (patients). Graphs are used to display the progress of the behavioral events. The data collection method is arduous, labor intensive and impacts the timeliness and reliability of the data, teaching and therapeutic methodologies.
When the service for the special need student/patient is provided in a home setting then issues like accountability, reliability and effectiveness of the behavioral stream data must be considered. Since the treatment is done in a home, professional supervision of the services being provided is unavailable. No one is able to view and suggest whether the intervention is proper, necessary or complete. Even the ability to verify that services were provided appropriately at the assigned location by the authorized person for the full amount of time requires additional personnel.
In addition, there are no standardized tools that are being used by professionals to help these individuals. Information concerning the type of tests and observations that have been made about individuals and about their progress is either not properly maintained or maintained in ad hoc fashions by professionals. Furthermore, the prior art has not provided a tool that might be utilized to improve the social skills, whether communications or eye contact skills, of the mentioned individuals.